This Is Woman's Work with Nicole Kalil - How To Be Selfish with Naketa Ren Thigpen | 329

Episode Date: July 23, 2025

We’ve been conditioned to believe that “selfish” is a dirty word—especially if you’re a woman. But what if selfishness isn’t the problem… what if it’s the prescription? In this episode, Nicole is joined by Naketa Ren Thigpen—Balance and Relationship Advisor, psychotherapist, and author of Selfish: Permission to Pause—to unpack the radical (and necessary) idea that choosing yourself isn’t a betrayal of others… it’s a reclamation of you. Naketa brings her signature truth-telling fire as the two discuss boundaries, burnout, guilt, and why being full of yourself might just be the most generous thing you can do. We’re flipping the narrative from self-less to self-fulfilled. If you’ve ever felt like you’re drowning in expectations or trying to pour from an empty cup, this episode is the wake-up call you didn’t know you needed. Connect with Naketa:  Website: www.thigpro.com Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/channel/balance-and-relationships/id6475793180 Book: https://www.amazon.com/Selfish-Permission-Pause-Live-Laugh/dp/1732983801  Related Podcast Episodes: How To Practice Radical Self Care with Shelly Tygielski | 302 How To Get What You Want with Jenny Wood | 293 How To Be You, But Better with Olga Khazan | 288 Share the Love: If you found this episode insightful, please share it with a friend, tag us on social media, and leave a review on your favorite podcast platform! 🔗 Subscribe & Review:Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I am Nicole Kalil, and I would bet that there is a word that's silently dictating your life. It's unconsciously shaping your decisions, influencing your choices, and possibly wreaking havoc on your relationships. For many women, it's the dirtiest of dirty words when we avoid it all costs. We're terrified of being labeled with it, judged for it, and seen as it.

Any guesses? The word is selfish. As a woman, a partner, a friend, a colleague, or as a mom, can you even imagine being selfish, let alone being accused of it? It feels like a rebellion against everything we're told we're supposed to be, right? In a world that demands us to be endlessly giving, nurturing and self-sacrificing, selfishness feels like a crime

against our identity. But here's a twist. What if being selfish isn't the horrible thing that we've been told? What if, like failure, it's something that we've been taught to avoid at all costs, but in reality, avoiding it costs us more of what actually matters because it's a necessary thing for things like confidence

and success and all the stuff that's important. What if, and hold onto your seats for this one, what if being selfish is actually the key to unlocking a life of love, fulfillment, and authentic happiness? I don't know, friend, but we're about to find out. And for the record, I love nothing more than a good reframe, so I'm coming into this conversation with an open mind

and a ton of excitement. Today, we're diving into this provocative topic with none other than Nikita Ren Thigpen, balance and relationship advisor, captivating speaker, host of the Balance Boldly podcast, and author of Selfish, Permission to Pause. Nikita has a groundbreaking approach that merges psychotherapy, trauma expertise,

and relationship wisdom to challenge norms and ignite transformative change. Nikita, thank you for joining us, and I'm clearly excited to have you challenge what being selfish means. So that seems like a pretty good place to start. How is being selfish not a bad thing? Mm. First, let me congratulate you

on entering with an open mind, because this is a conversation that so many humans, especially those that I identify as female, struggle with because we are raised to do just the opposite, right, of being selfish. I say being intentionally selfish specifically as my reframe on the way that I looked at redefining it. When you give yourself that permission to be intentionally selfish,

you are literally giving yourself, your own self, an intimate personal gift to create joy your way. Not bartered on anyone else's expectations, not about including someone else in your selfish time. We do it all the time when we have self-care days as ladies. We're like, oh, I'll have self-care with my five friends from college and my three coworkers and my niece and my nephew and whoever else.

And before you know it, you're in host mode. Your energy is super low because you're exhausted from your day away from all the busyness. You weren't being intentionally selfish. And I literally teach people that real self-care day away from all the busyness, you weren't being intentionally selfish. I literally teach people that real self-care is being intentionally selfish. To take care of you, to do your forgiveness work, your self-love work, whatever it is, to wiggle your toes and watch Netflix, whatever it is that you need to do for yourself, that

is the space that you get to just be. You can tune your inner brilliance up, which some people call intuition, and start to actually be able to not only hear yourself, Nicole, but trust yourself. So I love the term intentionally selfish because I think sometimes when we think about being selfish, we think about what we're gonna do to other people, the harm we're gonna cause, things like that.

This is not a by accident type of thing. This is something we are being mindful about and intentional about. I love that you brought up the hosting thing. I know I do that. And sometimes being intentionally selfish means having some time with friends to refill my cup. But this, you know, not slipping into hosting mode and also I

Often find I try very hard to make it convenient for everybody You know if I'm gonna have me time It's like what 20 minutes around everybody else's schedule and everybody else's priorities. Can I fit this in? Yes versus prioritizing it and being intentional about it as if it's as important as all the other things. Yeah, and it's actually more important, right? Not to be morbid, but for most of us, the rocks of our family, the rocks of our businesses,

the rocks of our leadership positions that we sit on, most people around us wouldn't know what to do if we went out of our leadership positions that we sit on. Most people around us wouldn't know what to do if we went out of commission for more than a hot beat, right? Let alone if you self-care your way into a hospital because your version of self-care was always or majority hosting other people, holding space for other people. Those things are great. I love to host. My whole business is about holding space, right? Which is also why I take a six week sabbatical once in the summer and another 18 to 21 days at the end of the year.

Not because I don't love what I do, but I needed to create my business in a way where I was walking my talk and able to refuel, recalibrate, sometimes shed, right? Like shedding those people, places, and things that we people pleased ourselves into yeses because this is the year of yes. We all go through that as women, saying yes to so many opportunities because the FOMO, we don't want to miss out, and we leave from those places trying to figure out,

why did I get sick right after I came back from that beautiful place? Why when I was on the vacation, I couldn't turn off my brain of the thousand things that I should be doing instead of being here on vacation? All of those things are literally compacting and calcifying, like cement, if you will, around our purpose. And we can't breathe. And part of it is because we've conditioned ourselves

in addition to the conditioning that already human guardians and family members that raised us or whoever was involved in your rearing, they didn't know better. So they were taught you give, you give and you give. And I say, yes, give, give, grow. Don't give, give and go broke. And I mean that more than financially.

Your energy, I know too many humans that have been laying on bathroom floors, crying, snotting their tears out, everything, because they are just done. They're tired as tired. And a lot of us do that to ourselves, trying to not be the person that's labeled selfish when it's exactly what we need to do.

Not be in our ego or push people away or make boundaries so rigid that we can't breathe, but literally be able to say, you know what? I have these expansive boundaries because I'm selfish, because I loved me today, because I said, screw all the other things that just don't compete with my health today. It matters. You matter. Totally. I mean, we've heard this so often,

but it's that put the mask on yourself first sort of philosophy. Now, I have the answer for myself, but you talk about this all the time with so many different people, and I'm curious, what do you think prevents people most from being selfish or for taking this intentional selfish time?

What is getting in the way of us actually doing this? Yeah, so you hit all of the high level markers of what most people would say, oh, I don't have time, I don't have the money for that right now. Not that they don't have money, but I don't have the money for that right now. Not that they don't have money, but I don't have the money for that, right? And often, assuming that it's not an actual economic issue

or challenge, because those are real things that really are occurring for people, assuming that's not the case, underneath all of it is you don't feel worthy. You don't feel worthy of giving yourself that space. You would tell your girlfriend, your best friend, your sister, your cousin, your sister cousin, right? You would tell them in a minute,

girl, you better take a minute for you. Breathe, they can wait. We would tell them in a heartbeat, I see that you're about to break down. I see that you're beyond burnout. I see that you are not your beautiful, brilliant self. Take a beat. That's what I would tell anyone that I love.

But then when the mirror is on me, what I would tell anyone that I love. But then when the mirror is on me, and I have to say that to me, because sometimes we have to save ourselves. Nobody's coming to save you. Somebody might be coming to encourage you, to guide you, to give you a blueprint, but no one is coming to save you.

And you have to do that with yourself in the mirror. And when that mirror is on you, and you're sitting there like, why can't I give myself that same permission? It's way deeper than the guilt, than the expire expectations of other people, than your own expire expectations, because you said you would do this by 30, this by 40, this by 42 and a half, right? Like whatever. It is you not feeling that you have justified enough in your accomplishments and your beautiful and often addictive,

ambitious personality, that you are enough right now in this moment and you are worth having a second. Whatever that second looks like, two minutes to blow bubbles, kick up your feet, wiggle your toes like I wasn't playing, like it's really helpful for your calf muscles when you do that. You can also take 20 minutes or two hours or two weeks. You can build up to whatever works for you.

For us, for Thig Pearl Balance and Relationship Management Institute, we're very strategic. My six-week sabbatical is for the whole company, not just for me, and it's specifically, strategically timed at a time in our business when we were actually losing money instead of gaining it by trying to push through. That's why we do it in the summer. We're a personal development and relational wellness company. There's not a lot of conferences happening in the summer where I can do keynote speaking and pull people into the funnel and blah, blah, blah.

It was a lot of meetings, a lot of coffee hours. You know pre-COVID, you driving around the city, meeting everybody, you buying scones and coffee that you didn't finish because you got four people that day, that you're meeting in that block of time. We were wasting money, time, and energy, and lots of people were counseling and rescheduling, oh, I forgot I had a baby shower, oh, my nephew's graduating high school or college, or oh, I'm just not going to be able to do this, Or we're doing a long weekend in Paris, right? All good reasons to cancel a meeting, but we're sitting there as a company losing money.

I was like, oh, here we go. This is the perfect place strategically, of course, we looked at the numbers, to put a sabbatical. No one has to do it for six weeks either, but whatever works for you to kind of babystep yourself into loving on you. And I literally call that specific sabbatical self-lovecation. Even though the whole company gets it, it's self-lovecation, not me and my boo lovecation. Now my husband gets integrated in there, you know, 30 years we got to keep the fires alive,

but he gets a little time. My grandbabies get a little time. My kids get a little time. I even have girlfriend time, but I also have a bubble within the bubble where no one gets to touch that unless it's a true, like, medical emergency. Because the whole point is for me to refuel so I can come back and dominate.

And you have to be willing, as a human who's listening to this interview with myself and Nicole right now, to say, what am I worth? Can I at least start with two minutes and build from there? So you led perfectly into my question as kind of these smaller ways to start. Because I think sometimes when we make it so big in our minds, like it seems insurmountable or too hard.

So what are some, and you've already said a few, but what are some ideas for those people listening who are like, all right, you're right, but my schedule is so busy, like where do I start? Because I see myself headed for the bathroom floor, right? Like, and you're right, that's where all the breakdowns happen, right? Um, so I see myself headed there. What can I do now and layer on over time

to practice being selfish? One of my favorite is to baby step. If we're talking about micro-sabbatical specifically, even though there's so many different ways, but if we're talking about like, I need a little bit more spaciousness, I really want to do a micro-sabbatical. And I say micro on purpose,

because most people think sabbatical six-plus months, right, like totally off the grid, whatever. Micro for us is anything less than 12 weeks. But you can start with a work patient. Most of us have done that unintentionally. Like we were on vacation, still checking the email, still pulling out the laptop, still finishing a report, an audit or whatever, right? But what about when we do it strategically?

And we say, you know what, I have X project coming up, not heavy duty, there's like power player audit stuff happening where the whole company is doing 90 hour weeks. That's not the time to do it. But let's just assume it's a traditionally full week, was I trying not to say busy. So traditionally full week, and you're looking at your schedule and you're like, you know

what? There's a four day holiday coming up in, I don't know, 10 weeks, whatever holiday is recognized in your country, because I know this is a global show, but wherever you're recognized. And it's a four day weekend coming up, but you can't really totally come off the grid. So you pick a project that you're willing to take with you during that time. And when I say with you, I don't mean that you have to be traveling. I just mean that it's coming into your personal space because work-life balance isn't 50-50, right? It's all about

your truth and your boundaries to create that truth as a reality. So if I say I have a, I'll just pick on something tangible. I have a 30 page report that I have to get done metrics and all the things. I also have 25 other things, but let's just pick on something tangible. I have a 30 page report that I have to get done, metrics and all the things. I also have 25 other things, but let's just pick on the report. The report is something that if I don't get this done, I really can't enjoy myself. And I know that I need to get this done.

So I'm going to create blocks of time, almost like an open office hours with myself for this report. So maybe I do assume it's a Friday to a Monday, assume I'm going to do two hours in the morning of easing into my day, whatever that looks like for me. I love tea, I love journaling, I love sex, I love my Peloton, like whatever. You ease into your day with how your morning starts and then you do something transitionary, like maybe your shower is your transition

before you now go into the work mode of your four hour block or two hour block. Maybe the transition is you just finish your protein shake and now it's time to go. But just have something that is your kind of neurological key that I'm turning the key into work mode right now. Because you also get to turn that key back when you're at the end of that two, three, four hour block. You do that on Friday, and then you ease into whatever your evening is, suppose of a friend's family, the dog, the frog, whatever. Saturday you do the same. Sunday you might have a little bit more time, because you're trying to wrap this thing with

a bow on it, so that you can have all of that final day of the four day weekend of Monday completely to yourself. One of the things that I love doing, because I still do this to this day with workations when I have big projects or books or whatever, one of the reasons that I love it is because I don't like to apologize for the fact that I am an overachiever, right? I'm getting things done, period. But I'm also a lazy overachiever, and I'm aware of that. I love my rest. I embrace the rest. And I have to balance that overachieving

with making sure that I have some spaciousness for myself and my nervous system and whatever it is, my marriage, right, like whatever it is that I need, and recognizing that without feeling like I have to put success down in order to pick up self-care or to pick up relationship bliss or to pick up, you know, maintaining and managing healthy friendships with my platonic friends, I don't want to put it down.

I want to literally be able to dance with all the things, but the way that I can do that without the guilt is knowing that I prioritize something that was critical to me, to my business, to my leadership, to my work, whatever, and I still made some space for me. Nikita, I wish I would have talked to you many, many years ago because my husband and I

do something similar when we go on vacation or when we travel, but it was born out of frustration and fights because we would go on trips. We we travel, but it was born out of frustration and fights because we would go on trips. We both love to travel. That's like my ideal form of self-care. And so we take these trips, but like you said, we're both ambitious. We have things we really care about and we were trying to like sneak it in, you know,

in between things and we could tell the other person was distracted, and it's like, why have you been on the phone for so long? And ultimately, what we ended up doing that we still do today is most days when we vacation, we give each other an hour, 90 minutes in the morning. But like you said, we kind of get our coffee. We find a place that's really nice in wherever it is that we're staying.

And our daughter gets iPad time or time to call her friends, which she really wants anyway and We set a timer and we have that time to do whatever it is that we need to do so that we can enjoy the rest of our time the rest of each other the rest of the location that we're at while also not carrying around this like never-ending to-do list or this feeling that there's so much shit waiting for us on the other side. So I really vouch for that as a great starting point,

whether it's a vacation or a weekend or a half day or something along those lines. So my next question is around this mathematical formula that you have. I'm very curious about it. You mentioned earlier work-life balance is not 50-50. It doesn't ever work out that way. So tell us about how you find that balance of joy and work and life and all that stuff.

Yeah. So, you asked, you didn't realize this, but you asked a loaded question. So, there's a formula for balance, which is part of the formula for joy. And if you don't mind, I'll give you the whole thing. I love it. So for balance, which obviously is a part of the statement of work-life balance, it is literally admitting the truth of what you want. Think of it as a fraction.

T like Tom over top of B like boy. Admit the truth of what you want, not what you need. Needs are understood. We need safety, we need security, we need food, we need shelter, right? Needs are understood. But what do you really want? Which means we have to do some other work. What are those expectations of our 20-year-old self that's still lingering, oh my God, you

didn't become a double CEO by the time you were 25, whatever. Those expectations, we just got to put to the side and be grateful for what we've accomplished and all that. But also the noise away from maybe even what we said six months ago when the year started. Oh, I'm going to do this. I'm going to do that. And life gave you other opportunities.

And I'm saying opportunities very purposefully. Maybe it was a lot of shit and shit is an acronym for storms, hurricanes, a few intervals and tsunamis. Maybe that's what you got out of life this particular year at the time that you're listening to this. And it wasn't as many glorious opportunities or vice versa, but it still didn't line up to what you said you were going to do at the top of the year or the end of the last one. So let's recalibrate. I'm like, you know, what does Nikita want now as a grandmother of two, as a mother for the last 30 years, you know,

like all the things, like what does she want now, not what she said she was gonna get, you know, X number of times. Like, well, Nikita wants more time with G babies. Both of my grandbabies have ASD, which is their own, the autism spectrum disorder, and my youngest has sickle cell. So there's lots of layers and complications.

And I travel a lot for work, but I can't take the babies with me, right? Like the parents would love me to, but I can't do it. Part of it for that reason, if I want more time for them and I still love what I do with my businesses and all the things, how do I make room for that? Well, the answer partially is one being right honest with myself that this is what I want. And then looking at the boundaries,

which is the B of what I'm creating to make that a reality. So you need a boundary around your personal habits. Oh, guess what? These babies is tall and they heavy. My granddaughter is almost as tall as me and she is six years old. Now granted I'm very petite, but that's not the point. So I need to have strength, which means I need a boundary

around the commitment to myself to eat healthy, to walk regularly, to do whatever, peloton weights, whatever, I have to have a boundary around that time, which means even though my cousin who I love wants to call and have a two hour conversation about the same thing we've been talking about for 20 years, I can't talk to you right now cousin. I'll hit you back, right? Like this is something that I have a boundary around. I need boundaries around my energy management. Who is in your sphere, your circle of reciprocal influences right now today that's

actually taking more from you than they're giving. They're extractive instead of additive. And this could be work related, it could be personal, it could be your mama, right? Like who is it that's doing that? And let's check and recalibrate that, which is a whole process that I take my clients through. But like really looking at what your energy management capacity is

and why it may not be as optimal as it needs to be. And I need a boundary over that, which includes just because somebody texts me doesn't mean I have to respond right now. Doesn't mean that when I'm sitting with my friend Nicole, I have to have my phone out and I'm distracted by that. I need a boundary around that. If I said I want deeper intimacy with my friend,

and if I want deeper intimacy with my friend Nicole and if I want deeper intimacy with my friend Nicole, I need to have a boundary around my phone, right? And whatever else would be an issue for me during our hour and a half tea time or ketchup or whatever. And looking at all of your boundary zones, for me, I have a boundary zone around my devotional time, because faith is very important to me. For someone else, it might be their meditative time like really creating those boundaries so that you can become

The version of yourself that you said is your truth is what you want. So that's all balance No 70 30 50 50 60 40 nothing you add that like so now this fraction, right? So t over B plus your healthy relationships, which means we got to look at our relationships just because I've known you for 30 years doesn't mean that you still get to sit at my table, right? You might belong in the parking lot, right? Like that you might belong somewhere else because we were really not as close as when we were, when we were 17. We've known each other a long time. It feels good to have long-term friendships, but are you really my friend? Am I thinking about you when I get sick because my autoimmune is being a little wacky and

I have to be in the hospital for a few weeks? Are you on my list for my husband to call to pray for me? Who are those real people? Those people should have deeper access, not everybody who's in your contact list or your email book or your CRM or whatever the language is these days. So your healthy relationships plus intimacy squared. So intimacy is obviously just deeper connection.

It's not just sex. Now, if you happen to be in a forever lover type situation, well, yes, sex is important as a part of it, but that's just one of 13 elements of intimacy. Recreational intimacy, communication intimacy, conflict intimacy, like there's so many levels of that. So we would wanna look at where our intimacy is with those healthy relationships

that we've qualified as healthy. And then the squared part is now we need to go deeper. And that is with us. What is my intimacy with me? When was the last time I looked in the mirror and wasn't judging how many new beauty marks or tags or wrinkles or crow's feet or whatever was coming up? When was it just to take in the goodness? That's building that deeper intimacy. You know that exercise, you know, as a psychotherapist, something I've done with clients before

that you typically see on TV or you do with your husband if you've ever done marriage therapy and are like looking each other's eyes and just hold the gaze for five minutes, right? Well, when was the last time you looked in your eyes and held the gaze for five minutes? No judgment, no shaming, no blaming, no trying to get away from the awkwardness of it all and just was

like, damn Nicole, you hot. Come on girl. You are doing it, right? The character that has come with the wisdom of you and reframing how you talk to yourself. When was the last time that we've done that? And I know seven plus years ago, I could have easily said, Oh man, I don't even know the last time I actually looked in the mirror. Cause it's just like quick, quick brush your teeth, quick, quick, clean the gook out your eyes quick, quick, right? Like everything was quick, quick to get to the whatever was busy back in the day

that is now qualified as productive, but whatever that is. And just being really honest to take those moments with yourself, including being intentionally selfish. So, I love this formula. I love especially that it is so clearly wrapped around what matters most, right? Our healthy relationships, intimacy with the people we choose, But most importantly, for me, is the squared part, the intimacy with ourself. Because

in my work with confidence, one of the things I have really, I mean, it's just so obvious. We are not spending enough time with ourselves. We don't even know ourselves all that well, let alone intimacy. I mean, that is highly important. So I love this formula. Where does joy fit in? So that equals joy. Okay, equals joy.

Yes. When you have your balance plus your healthy relationships times your intimacy squared, you have now the exponential equivalent of joy. You have created it for yourself. So when people say, I have to find joy, I have to find balance, like part of it is our language and it's a little semantics,

but a lot of it is because we keep seeking out. And all of this was in, right? It was the person inside the professional, the person inside the entrepreneur, the person inside the bad bitch that person inside the entrepreneur, the person inside the bad bitch that put on a pencil skirt and heels, but she's a human on the inside. And when we get to know her and get to trust her and get to love her, him, they, them, whatever, when you get to really be grounded in that, you've created your joy and you get to add and take away

whatever doesn't fit anymore, whatever doesn't serve you. So my last question is we often are going to feel at least initially some shame, guilt, anger, fear going into something like this because it's new and different and opposite as we've said several times from what we've been taught or told all along. But you say that doing this,

becoming intentionally selfish, actually frees you from those same feelings, shame, guilt, anger, fear. How does that happen? It's like a muscle, right? Like if you have ever lost muscle, like because of maybe you were inactive for a certain amount of time in the hospital or whatever, you know how, or you had a baby, right?

And you're just like, everything's loose and goosey and all of it. It takes, it's very uncomfortable. You feel lack of confidence. Your esteem has impacted all of it until you start being consistent. It's having a baby, you got to put on big diapers, right? Like because of all the things, assuming that you've had a vaginal birth for those listening that have experienced that, it's so awkward. It's uncomfortable. It's embarrassing. It doesn't feel like something you should have to do in 2024. Like they're sending rockets to the

moon. Like, why can't we figure out another way to do this? But the reality is, it's the consistency in the time. We have to keep building the muscle. You keep trying your two minutes until it becomes four, until it becomes 20, until it becomes two hours, until you have a workcation with your man and you're like, yeah, we're not doing this feeling awkward about it. We're intentionally taking that hour, hour and a half power jam session with our work to get it done and then coming back together to really enjoy each other without the heaviness of what am I not doing? What part of me is

not being perfect? Because perfection is bondage. That's a whole different conversation, right? But when you're able to just say, you know what, this is hard, this is awkward, it's uncomfortable, and I'm worth it. It makes all the difference in the world. Because before you know it, you got your snatch back, right? You can get back into those jeans. You can start running again or walking fast or whatever it was that you were doing pre-baby in that kind of metaphor.

And now you feel stronger because you have a reference point of what it was to have to rebuild something. Right now, you're reconditioning your old way of being, not just deconditioning, but reconditioning with a new, integrative way to look at yourself. And you're doing it from a space of power because the resilience isn't built on a trauma, it's built on you choosing to strengthen something

that you deserve to be strong in, which is you. I love this reframe so much. Thank you for challenging our thinking around being selfish and intentionally selfish. Nikita, I know people are gonna wanna learn more. So the website is thigpro.com, and you can find more of Nikita's wisdom I know people are going to want to learn more. So the website is figpro.com and you can find more of Nikita's wisdom

on the Balance Boldly podcast as well as all the other places to find and follow Nikita. We'll put in show notes. So thank you for an incredible conversation and an important one at that. Thank you so much, Nicole. As Nikita said, being intentionally selfish isn't about taking from others. It's about filling yourself up because you so much, Nicole. As Nikita said, being intentionally selfish isn't about taking from others.

It's about filling yourself up because you deserve it, because you are worthy, and because you have even more to give. It's about giving yourself permission to pause, to breathe, and to be your most authentic self. What if being full of yourself wasn't something to be ashamed of, but something to be celebrated? Imagine a life where your cup is so full that it overflows, nourishing everything and everyone around you. Maybe, just maybe, being selfish is the ultimate form of generosity.

So as you go about your day, ask yourself, where can you be a little more selfish? Where can you create space for your needs, your desires, and your happiness? Where can you apply the formula T over B plus healthy relationships plus intimacy squared equals joy? Because when you do, you're not just living for yourself, you're living for everyone who benefits from being around you.

Self less? Why would you or anyone who cares about you want you to be less of yourself? I say more. More of you. More of what matters. More of what brings you joy and then maybe you'll have more to give. Because that is woman's work.